This formidable collection of essays offers a profound alternative vision for a more equitable future.
A professor emeritus reimagines Western notions of race, crime, and justice in this volume of essays.
Not only has America failed to adequately say “I am sorry” to the “descendants of Africa’s Eve,” writes Pettiway, it has also “never said, ‘Thank you,’ ” to the African American writers, artists, thinkers, and “ordinary people who worked with little recognition but who deserve great praise.” This prologue, which simultaneously challenges America’s self-perception and celebrates the lives of Black men and women, sets the tone for the poignant collection of 11 essays. Divided into four parts, the book begins with an analysis of “The Preliminaries,” highlighting the failures of American institutions to protect Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others, and emphasizing that the current paradigm of crime and justice as well as its historical foundation in white supremacy “ain’t workin’.” The volume’s second part consists of four essays that reflect on race and include an astute analysis of what Pettiway calls “white juju,” which refuses to interrogate Eurocentric worldviews, and condemns, rejects, and refuses to understand those who do “not wish to participate in a cultural universe that satisfies, and is driven by, white values.” Essays in the work’s third part employ an extended metaphor on Alice in Wonderlandto explore issues of crime, and the book’s final section urges a reconceptualization of justice that rejects a preoccupation with retribution. Pettiway is a professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University, and his research draws on his academic pedigree, boasting a 25-page bibliography and almost 500 endnotes. Yet the strength of this volume lies not in its impressive scholarly underpinnings, but rather in the author’s humane, honest, and piercing writing style. As one of the only fully ordained Buddhist monks in the Gelug tradition and as founder of a monastery in Indianapolis, Pettiway blends his astute understanding of criminal justice and sociological theory with a Dharmic spirituality and a philosophical embrace of radical definitions of love, justice, and liberation.
This formidable collection of essays offers a profound alternative vision for a more equitable future.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798989182008
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Meishin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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